A multi-year competition challenge to Facebook (aka Meta), which saw Germany’s antitrust authority become a pioneering champion for privacy rights in 2019 after it sought to block the social media giant’s ‘superprofiling’ of users on the grounds that consentless cross-site tracking of users is an “exploitative abuse” of Facebook’s monopoly position, finally concluded Thursday with […]
US government considers historic break-up of Google in antitrust case
The U.S. Justice Department has put forth a sweeping proposal to force Google to sell off parts of its business, potentially leading to the first major corporate breakup in four decades and reshaping one of the world’s most valuable tech companies. The Department of Justice and a coalition of state attorneys general on Tuesday submitted […]
Amazon dodges antitrust scrutiny in UK over Anthropic investment
The U.K.s’ antitrust authority has concluded that Amazon’s partnership and equity investment in AI startup Anthropic can’t be investigated under current merger rules due to the size and scope of the deal. The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) announcement comes six months to the day after news emerged that Amazon had completed a $ […]
The EU’s 10 biggest antitrust actions on tech
The U.S. innovates and the EU regulates, or so certain transatlantic punters love to harp. We’re not going to get embroiled in that noise here, but two things are clear: The bloc’s Single Market has its own particular set of rules, and quite a lot of U.S. tech giants have run afoul of European Union […]
Google nets court win against EU’s $1.7B AdSense antitrust decision
Google has succeeded in overturning a $ 1.7 billion antitrust penalty handed down by the European Union back in March 2019. The €1.49 billion fine, which Google appealed, was originally issued after the European Commission found the tech giant’s search ads brokering business had violated competition rules between 2006 and 2016 to cement a dominant […]